Death Is Destiny

As the reader begins the Handbook of Epictetus he is immersed in a world of knowledge which changes his perception about human destiny and anger. In the first section, Epictetus classifies life factors into those that are out of human control like disease, death and reputation, and those that can be controlled through a person’s actions like opinions and aversions. According to Epictetus, you will be miserable and lost if you “think that things naturally enslaved are free or that things not your own are your own” (11). This means that you have be able to know which things you can control and which things you can’t, a similar statement to that of the serenity prayer we repeatedly found in Slaughterhouse Five. The acceptance of this conclusion will lead a human being into a world of limits, by which he will be self-guided to understanding his life as dependant on the events that happen in his life, his perception of them, and roads taken on his arduous quest of his own unique and personal destiny.

The ideas, conclusions and life models you favor and those you are against, of are will determine who you are and what you’ll do. You also have to be able to determine which of these you can control and which life factors such as death can help you be wiser on how you choose to spend your time on the planet. In order to create a path in the right direction, you have to “detach your aversion from everything not up to us, and transfer it to what is against nature among the things that are up to us” (12). In order to accept death as your ineludible last step in the life cycle, you have to take it off the list of things you are against and help “death” keep your decisions in perspective. Death not as the destructor of life but as the final teaching ingredient of life.

In the Handbook of Epictetus, you are also confronted with the deceit of human judgment. As you begin to open your soul to the new input on death as part of life, Epictetus bombards you by saying, “death is nothing dreadful […] but instead the judgment about death that it is dreadful” (13). We have arrived at what I thought was Epictetus’ main point, humans build up opinions on judgments of opinions, on and on endlessly over time and in the end, they mistakenly accept these misleading conclusions as the truth. They become facts that become the basis of a human life’s, the race to escape death and suffering, but in the end if you are not able to accept death and suffering, you will not have fully lived.